Concord Companions: Margaret Fuller, Friendship, and Desire.

FRIENDSHIP in literature; DESIRE in literature; FULLER, Margaret, 1810-1850; FEMALE friendship; EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882; THOREAU, Henry David, 1817-1862; HISTORY of homosexuality; NINETEENTH century; TRANSCENDENTALISM (Literary period); 19TH century (Literary period)

In this paper, we examine the rhetoric of friendship and desire in mid-nineteenth-century American writing. We begin by looking at Emerson's essay on friendship and Thoreau's poem 'Sympathy' (1840) to provide a context for reading Margaret Fuller's fascinating texts on same-sex bonds between women. Of particular interest to us is Fuller's translation of Elizabeth von Arnim's Die Günderode (1840), a collection of letters between Arnim and the German Romantic poet Karoline von Günderode which provides compelling insights into the early to mid-nineteenth-century continuum between female friendship and same-sex desire. We situate this translation alongside Fuller's own female friendships and expressions of love for women, more specifically her declarations of love to Anna Barker and, later, to George Sand. This latter relationship, we suggest, was a source of admiration and anxiety, for Sand's cross-dressing and fluid sense of gender identity was simultaneously celebrated and condemned in Fuller's Women in the Nineteenth Century (1843). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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